A series of studies is proposed to examine how people comprehend and remember metaphorical language (e.g., The gentle wind tickled the wheat). This type of language, which is typically anomalous at the literal level, is more frequent than is usually realized, yet it has been until very recently virtually ignored by psycholinguists. Two major theoretical questions are to be examined. The first deals with the stages involved in the comprehension of a metaphor. Specifically, is there an intermediate stage of comprehending the literal meaning of the words at the focus of the metaphor (tickle in the above example) and using the literal meaning plus related stored knowledge to construct the intended metaphorical meaning? Such a step would presumably not occur in a semantically equivalent nonmetaphorical sentence (e.g., The gentle wind blew through the wheat). The second major theoretical question concerns the nature of the representation of the metaphorical meaning in memory. Specifically, is any informaion from the literal semantic domain of the metaphor focus contained in the memory representation e.g., any information about the act of tickling for the above example? Procedures used will include cued recall and forced-choice recognition memory, paragraphing (with latency with stimulus onset to initiation of paraphrase measured), and rating of sentences on a continuum of comprehensibility. The types of items will include both everday-language metaphors and quotations from Shakespeare.